Jobs

17

Votes

271

Hacker News, Reddit, Stack Overflow Stats

GitHub Stats

Description

What is
Ruby?

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

What is
Go?

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Reviews of Ruby, Go, and R

kfretwell33

Simple to learn

November 11, 2016 09:26

I taught myself Ruby about a year ago. I had experience with HTML/CSS, MySQL, and a little bit of javascript and python but would consider this my first true programming language I became proficient in (later picked up Swift).

I started with a CodeAcademy course before working on my first Rails project. The language is easy to read and Rails is an amazing framework. The online community is fantastic, the documentation is amazing, and there is no shortage of Ruby Gems which allows you to quickly "cobble" together a new project.

How developers use Ruby vs Go vs R

The first time I actually started using Go was for software on our devices. So on our hotspots we have some custom software running in the firmware. For the first device, that was actually completely built by our manufacturer. But for the second generation most of the parts are built by us in-house and we needed a way to quickly develop software for the device. But we don't have any C programmers in-house, so we were actually looking for something that basically sits in between the friendliness of Ruby, but the performance and the ability to be deployed on an embedded system which you get with C. That's basically what led us to Go and it's been awesome for that. It works so well and so great. Since it works so great, it pushed us into looking into whether we should start using this for some backend services as well.

Only thing worth noting here is that we saw some major issues with memory swapping on Heroku with Ruby 2.1.2. We weren’t the only ones. So we actually reverted back to 2.0.0. Here’s what happened: . We’re planning to upgrade to 2.1.4 once we’ve had time to test thoroughly.

What are my other choices for a vectorized statistics language. Professor was pushing SAS Jump (or was that SPSS) with a menu-driven point and click approach. (Reproducibility can still be accomplished, you publish the script generated by all your clicks.) But I want to type everything, great online tutorials for R. I think I made the right pick.

We wrote our own image processing, resizing, and snapshotting service in Go to allow our clients to send photos and GIFs to each other. Files are stored in S3, resized on the fly using OpenCV, and then cached in GroupCache before being served to clients.

Go allows it all to be quite fast and efficient, and entirely non-blocking on uploads!

When we are comparing Turing complete languages it's not about what compiles faster or to the cleanest machine code, it's about what the developer can think in and write faster, including the availability of libraries. A couple of times I wrote some ruby scripts for this project. I just like the language best for some things. Love the syntax.

Our main web scraping engine is built usign Golang because of the way how efficiently and fast this language is. Also out compilation facility let people who dont know Golang build fast as flash scrapers to run ourside of our platform without any knowledge in programming in Golang.

We are primarily a Ruby shop; our main apps are running on Ruby + Rails, our Slack bot is written in Ruby and our smaller projects are on Sinatra. It makes it really easy for us to re-use code and switch between different projects since they are all on the same language.

For some of our more taxing parts of our applications, something able to handle high I/O load quickly and with fast processing is needed. Go has completely filled that gap, allowing us to break down walls that would've been completely impossible with other languages.

Most of our services are written in Ruby. We started out as a Ruby shop, but we're slowly also moving some stuff to Go. We're using Go more and more these days, actually, including some backend services.